In its views adopted in the case of R.A.A. and Z. M. v. Denmark[1] on 15 December 2016, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee (HRC)[2] found that the deportation of two Syrian refugees from Denmark to Bulgaria would amount to a violation of Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights…

“Center for Legal Aid – “Voice in Bulgaria” (CLA), in partnership with Bulgarian Lawyers for Human Rights (BLHR), begins work on a new project focused on helping migrants at risk integrate into the community instead of being detained. The project is called: “Protecting migrants with precarious status: decreasing the use of detention and applying community-based…

(the full text of the report can be accessed here: in English and in Bulgarian) Between August 17, 2015 and August 16, 2016, the Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria (CLA) completed the project “Who Gets Detained? Increasing the Transparency and Accountability of Bulgaria’s Detention Practices of Asylum Seekers and Migrants”.* Through an…

(originally published in International Detention Monitor by the International Detention Coalition on May 11, 2016 at http://idcoalition.org/news/increasing-the-transparency-of-bulgarias-detention-practices/) Increasing Transparency of Bulgarian Detention: New Website How easy or difficult is it to find out information about immigration detention in Bulgaria? One of members, The Centre for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria, is tackling this very issue…

By Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria* By virtue of its geography, Bulgaria is likely the most important land border of the European Union with regards to recent migration flows and Europe’s efforts to keep asylum seekers off the continent’s territory. It borders both Turkey, where millions of refugees reside and which is…

As part of the Who Gets Detained? project, over the course of 10 months starting in August 2016, the team of the Center of Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria collected statistics on the number and characteristics of the people who end up behind the walls of the closed centres for foreigners, and of those who are arrested and…

by Maria Cheresheva “There is no life for us – neither in Bagdad, nor anywhere else. The Islamic State rape girls and force them to convert to Islam. They have taken over 500 girls already. It was unbearable at this point. I dropped out of fifth grade and left.” This is how the story of…

By CLA staff On 15 February 2016, the Ombudsman of the Republic of Bulgaria published its annual report as a National Prevention Mechanism of torture and other forms of cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment in Bulgaria’s prisons and other places for deprivation of liberty. A key theme in the report were the conditions in the…

by Radostina Pavlova A landmark decision of the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) from January 2016 may improve substantially the state of human rights for detainees in the closed centres for foreigners awaiting deportation, sparing them the humiliation and pain of body searches and solitary confinement. The ruling in successful lawsuit against the Ministry of…

An analysis of 55 rulings of the Sofia City Administrative Court, related to the detention of migrants in the Busmantsi closed centre, shows that it is relatively easy for the police to find reasons to issue detention orders. Not having ID documents or having already served a prison sentence for crossing the border illegally are…